Everyone has a ‘comfort food’, an item of food that one associates with childhood, home, mother…….and for me for ever so long it used to be ‘curd rice’! How I grew out of that is another story, but for these last many years my ‘comfort food’ has been a drink, the filter coffee. Children were not allowed to drink coffee, but amongst my earliest memories is one of my grandfather, sneaking me a sip from his ‘tumbler’! Of course, no chinaware entered our Brahmin house then. It was a time, long before plastic had entered our lives in any manner or form.

Coffee was a ritual and was made only in the morning and at tiffin time, which was the late afternoon. The first thing that was done in the morning was to light the wood fire and put water to boil. My mother would have already had her bath…